On dopamine discourse
Quiet twitting, the rise of compliment-based platforms, Spotify personality types, and a modern form of weltschmertz
I hope this email finds you well!
<please insert your favorite “how this email finds me” meme here>
Back after a brief break and so much to discuss…
👯 Collective coping and collective effervescence
Well, if you’re like me and still (barely) on Twitter the vibe is very much everyone saying a tearful goodbye to their friends and then awkwardly walking alongside each other for several more blocks. Can we call it quiet twitting?
Anyways, many of us are now seekers avidly hoping for something new. Oh, there’s tooting embarassed giggle on the pachyderm site, a possible LinkedIn takeover which I hope was not serious (and does not seem to be given a recent scan of the posts), Discord for the cool kids who were invited, a return to Tumblr for the retro hipsters, or a quick hello to Ello (where I maybe still have an account so). Now there’s Hive Social with its chronological feed and Post that promises the content moderation we’d have liked to see on Twitter.
Some of my favorite ideas so far:
postcards
shared google doc (until it went from internet 1.0 hello world to nazis in less than 24 hours)
staring into the middle distance and sighing
What other platform will become a collective coping strategy for the copious bad news and the occasional source of collective effervescence rooting for a raccoon to make it up the side of a building? Probably not Hive Social with its more sensible chronological feed that will resist the upheaval of emotion nor Post with its lengthy waitlist.
I, for one, dusted off Facebook, which I’ve been using rarely. Heartened by a recent moment where locals read my mind and captured a beautiful Hudson Valley sunrise that I’d missed (see our Friday Feeling below!), I logged on. It was my birthday too, I confess. Rather than share a half-hearted group thank you to the few folks still on Facebook, here’s what I did: I started an actual, if brief, conversation with each. And it was uplifting in a way that I hadn’t experienced in quite some time.
So is there hope that rather than collecting friends could we actually be good friends?
🧪 Dopamine discourse be damned
Who among us hasn’t been just a little bit conditioned to want to post so that a number shows up under the post so that the number goes up so that you can get a little boost so that you feel good about yourself? I mean, I’m ready to be rehabilitated into human conversation again, but we have to acknowledge that the current tech has shaped how we express our emotions, how we respond to each other’s emotions, and how we actually experience those feelings.
Maybe the compliment-based apps are on to something. When my DD (that’s old school, darling daughter to you) showed me a SFM (suitable for mom) compliment that she received on Gas, I was intrigued. Like so many platforms that take hold for a minute with teens, Gas may go the way of BeReal in a week or two (especially given the rumors circulating about it). But with dating app Bumble launching compliments, maybe we’ll see a trend. Flattery will get you everywhere, especially if it’s sincere.
In the meantime, here’s a compliment for y’all. You are not too old; teens are not only highly motivated to interact with their friends but they also have A LOT more time to play. They are not all tech geniuses, they are more like restless experimenters. You’re just busy, babe, and it’s okay.
🔮 What’s your Spotify personality type?
Just after Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday comes—no not a day of rest—but Spotify Wrapped day! It’s the day we unwrap the gift of our own listening data with a dash of delight, a crumb of cringe, and a modicum of memes. Spotify Listening Personality follows in the footsteps of last year's Audio Aura, which was sparked by the rising popularity of aura readings and tarot.
This year Spotify got hip to the personality test trend that’s so popular—or was it ever not popular idk— and served up your listening personality in the style of Myers-Briggs 16 personality categories which I have dutifully collected for you below.
Every user's listening personality is made up of four metrics:
Familiarity (F) vs. Exploration (E): Do you mostly listen to your favorite artists over and over (F), or do you sample a lot of new artists (E)?
Timelessness (T) vs. Newness (N): Do you listen to brand new music right when it comes out (N), or do you wander the vast catalog of all the music ever made (T)?
Loyalty (L) vs. Variety (V): Do you find yourself going back to the same tracks and playing them on repeat (L), or do you like to spin through a lot of music before repeating (V)?
Commonality (C) vs. Uniqueness (U): Do you listen to mostly popular artists along with millions of fellow fans (C), or do you look deeper for someone less well-known (U)?
Now the grumpy skeptics among us might grumble about all the data Spotify collects, while the rest of us enjoy a little window into our own and our dear ones’ and random internet users’ psyches. Why not both? If companies are collecting data about us, why shouldn’t we have access to it in a meaningful, accessible, and even playful way?
Sure I can extrapolate something about myself (or at least what data is collected) via recommendations and ads, but otherwise, I don’t have a chance to reflect on the whole. Why couldn’t this algorithmic era at least help us to become more reflective, especially when we know that’s how we develop self-awareness and empathy?
If you’re still with me, you could always try Icebergify to see just how deep your musical taste goes or homegrown tools like Spotify Pie, Instafest, or How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? (which I’ve mentioned before in the context of Profile-Litost) too.
Or maybe you’re inspired, as am I, to do better next year. I’m already plotting strategies to move out of my comfort zone, which is literally my personality as a Replayer. Who says music algorithms aren’t shaping our emotional life?
If you listen enough, you’ll also get an intriguing snapshot of your audio day. Perhaps your morning self is poetic and bittersweet, while your afternoon persona is anxious and hype-lit energy, and your evening is characterized by wistful yearning. Obviously, an in-depth analysis of Spotify musical moods is a topic for future scholarship. I personally can’t wait to see a meta-study on Spotify emotion categories and Netflix tags so that I won’t spend more time contemplating the classification system than listening and watching.
Friday Feeling > Vemödalen
🔑 DEFINITION
The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
See also: Weltschmertz, ennui, futility
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Vemödalen is an emotion word invented in 2013 by John Koenig. First published on his Tumblr blog, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. On YouTube, Koenig narrates 465 very similar photos taken independently by different photographers. The list of emotions that we all feel but don't have the vocabulary to express are based on etymologies, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots, but are neologisms.
Inventing words isn’t new. Charles Dickens made up curses to avoid offending Victorian readers. George Orwell invented newspeak to describe talk used to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Before the novel 1984 was published in 1949, no English word gave the same sinister sense, and today the “speak” suffix still indicates dangerously fake language, thanks to Orwell. More recently, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff is a “dictionary of things that there aren’t any words for yet” using place names to define emotions that aren’t articulated as a current English word.
It also captures our imagination in the same way that untranslatable emotion words from other languages do. There’s the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity” or the Portuguese saudade, a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place, or thing that is far away. This particular neologism plays on the meme of “Is there are German word for X?” (hint: there usually is) given German’s concise complexity that has prompted English to borrow many words, including schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in the misfortune of another.
The concept of vemödalen, like so many of the world-weary emotions capture in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, has its roots in another era despite its focus on a particularly modern affliction. Vemödalen echoes the Romantic period’s obsession with weltschmertz (a feeling that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind), ennui, and longing. The idea that it’s all been done before is, ironically, not new.
It also recalls Walter Benjamin’s work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which explained how mechanical reproduction devalues the aura of a work of art. And, of course, the art of Andy Warhol challenged the idea that mechanical reproduction saps meaning.
💬 EXPRESSION
Having the precise expression, or le bon mot, is gratifying and explains our collective fascination with new words for new emotions. Vemödalen is one of those words that add shades of nuance but hasn’t entered the vernacular, like some of the other “obscure sorrows” such as sonder.
💗 EXPERIENCE
We long to be different, to stand out from the crowd. With over 7 billion people on the planet, being unique can seem like an exercise in futility though. Vemödalen vexes us: “the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.”
The common thread among the “sorrows” is inadequacy, frustration, and impotence where Koenig describes how each is “bagged, tagged, and tranquilized” then “released gently into the subconscious” to haunt us.
A shift in perspective can help us to resist hopelessness, however. As Koenig suggests, “It should be a comfort that we’re not so different, that our perspectives so neatly align, that these same images keep showing up again and again.” Vemödalen can reveal our common humanity.
❝ QUOTE
“That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Walt Whitman
💡 BIG PICTURE
Vemödalen can lead to frustration if we focus on the futility of contributing something original. We can, instead, take that as a creative challenge and find something new in a well-worn theme, we are each adding to the story of human existence. We are connected by a common appreciation of beauty. Or we can revel in our collective appreciation of beauty and shared meaning.
Either way, adopting more nuanced and specific emotion words can change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we have previously ignored. Think of descriptions of emotions like the weather. There are dark, cloudy days portending a downpour and bright, sunny days filled with cotton candy clouds. using the word, cloudy, doesn’t quite express it and it doesn’t let you plan ahead for that umbrella.
🤔 LEARN MORE
Did you catch the passing mention of vemödalen in season 2, episode 4 of The White Lotus where Portia laments the impossibility of experiencing anything that hasn’t been captured on Instagram?
No coffeeshops yet but there’s an obscure, eponymous Scottish alternative rock band and they could use a few more likes tbh
Read this deep dive into How Fictionaries are Liberating the World in The Guardian
🟣 🟪 🟠 🟧 🟢 🟩 🟡 🟨
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗